Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  Odds were good nothing of the sort would happen. He figured he would become frustrated with the effort to uncover some hidden truth or insight and give up, succumbing to the temptation of the weed when he realized no such revelation was forthcoming, not today or on any other day. The truth was simpler. His boredom was such that any deviation from the norm made him want to invest the event with some deeper meaning than it really possessed.

  But Noah wasn’t ready to let it go just yet.

  Instead of sitting out on the porch until the sun completed its slow slide toward the horizon, he went back into the cabin and sat in the sofa in the outer room, where he frowned at the large-screen TV mounted on the opposite wall. Once upon a time, the device had been a marvel of modern technology, with a stunning HD display. Now, though, it was a useless hunk of nothing hanging from the wall for no good reason. The local power grid had failed long ago. Luckily, the cabin had a powerful generator. But there had been no fuel to run the thing for years, despite the initial ample supply Noah’s father had stocked the property with at the outset of the plague.

  In those early months on the mountain, having a working alternate power source made it occasionally possible to buy into an illusion of normality. Perhaps sensing the necessity of distraction, Noah’s dad had brought along a large selection of movies on Blu-ray discs. After their mother died, Noah and his sister spent a lot of time right here on this sofa watching those movies. They mostly avoided watching the news after events out in the world took several apocalyptically bad turns. Civilization was a lost cause and watching the erratic documentation of its downfall had been too depressing. Up here in the mountains, it had almost been possible to pretend that none of it was happening.

  But then things changed.

  The gas reserves ran low. They scavenged for more and found enough to help for a while, but it wasn’t enough. It never could have been enough. And then the gas ran out, except for what was in the SUV’s tank, which had to be conserved.

  Then his sister got sick.

  It started with coughing fits, which got progressively worse. Noah remembered the fear he’d felt at that first sight of blood on Aubrey’s lips. Blood meant something serious. It wasn’t the zombie virus. They’d been in the mountains for months by then and Aubrey had been effectively shielded from contact with the dead things the entire time. But the blood was bad. And soon there was a lot more of it. Every time he saw blood dribble out of her mouth, a deep dread seized Noah. A picture of a dire future took shape in his head, one possessed with a grim and undeniable inevitability.

  He knew exactly what would happen before it happened. His sister would just keep getting sicker. Her illness, whatever it was, would not respond to any home remedy. Their increasingly distraught father would try something desperate and everything would change forever.

  Noah was right about all of it.

  His father bundled the deathly ill Aubrey into the SUV and drove back down the mountain in search of a still-functioning hospital or doctor. Noah had wanted to go with them, but his father insisted he remain behind as he had his hands full with Aubrey and couldn’t possibly protect both of them. Noah wasn’t a child. He was a young adult a year or so removed from a disastrous post-high school stint in college. He reminded his father of this, pointing out that they were headed into an incredibly dangerous and uncertain situation, into a world in tumult, and that he could certainly use his goddamned help. But the emotional display only solidified his father’s resolve. So they left Noah there alone on the mountain.

  He never saw either of them again.

  That was over five years ago.

  Noah got up from the sofa, went out to the porch, and packed his pipe. The need to divine some deeper meaning from the angst gripping him in the aftermath of dealing with the zombie had deserted him, at least for the time being. The only thing he cared about at the moment was driving back the painful old memories. With this aim in mind, he settled into the rocking chair and got higher than he had in a very long time.

  4.

  Night had fallen by the time Noah’s eyes fluttered open hours later. He was still in the rocking chair out on the porch, having drifted off at some indeterminate point. The glass pipe had slipped from his fingers while he was unconscious. After stretching his arms a moment, he scooped the pipe up from the porch. There was still a small bit of weed tamped down in the bottom of the bowl, and he briefly considered smoking the rest of it. Instead he tucked the pipe in his shirt pocket and frowned as he stared out at the dark clearing.

  Noah rarely allowed himself to fall asleep outdoors for extended periods. His father had instilled in him a deep-seated wariness of leaving himself exposed and vulnerable in a world in which the old rules no longer applied. Doing so would, of course, render him susceptible to zombie and animal attack, but his father had also cautioned him against trusting live human beings, who were potentially an even bigger threat. There was no law anymore. A man could kill you and rob you blind without fear of being locked up or sent to death row.

  But Noah no longer considered this a real possibility. Years without seeing another living person made it seem remote. In the early days of being alone, however, he’d dreaded nightfall, the darkness heightening the already crushing sense of isolation. He’d had a hard time sleeping back then, overreacting to every little sound in the vicinity of the cabin. In his mind, a probably harmless animal snuffling around in the darkness became a stealthy bandit creeping up for a look at his property. The paranoia didn’t begin to ease until more than a full year alone in the mountains. Though it did finally ease, the wariness remained.

  Which was why he almost always kept the rifle with him when he sat out here at night. In the wake of the unplanned, extended nap, however, he was unarmed. He considered going back inside for the rifle, but he did not immediately get up from the chair. His thoughts returned to the zombie from this afternoon. Some of the unsettled feeling from earlier also came back to him.

  This time, though, he felt like he had a handle on at least part of why he felt so out of sorts. It wasn’t about any negligible threat the zombie had presented. It was more about the disruption of an illusion. In a way, it was similar to what he and the rest of his family had experienced when there was no more gas for the generator. This shift in perception, however, wasn’t as stark and dramatic as that had been. This time the illusion had been more subtle.

  He had been up here on the mountain so long that the life he had known before the fall had come to seem like something from a dream, or, perhaps, a story he’d fabricated in his mind to stave off the boredom of isolation. Objectively, he knew this wasn’t true, but the notion was invested with a seductive quality that made belief seem possible. His memories of the old world now seemed like lies, or like fairytales twisted beyond recognition through generations of retelling. The images in his head from that time felt like glimpses of an alien world. Until this afternoon, he had been able to envision a day, maybe not so far into the future, when his weary mind would allow him the comfort of believing he’d always lived up here on the mountain. That the old world had never really existed.

  The zombie had changed that.

  The dead thing was a reminder not only of the incontrovertible existence of the old world, but also of that world’s cataclysmic demise. And there was even more to it than that. Civilization might have passed away, but its corpse was still out there. In his head he saw empty cities standing in ruin, dark skyscrapers with shattered windows, streets choked with the decaying remains of countless dead.

  Noah abruptly rose from the rocking chair, deciding he needed another way to divert his mind from these dark thoughts. Getting high again so soon after passing out on the porch wasn’t an attractive option, so he decided he would spend the rest of the night reading a selection from his cache of western novels by the light of an oil lamp.

  He was on the verge of stepping through the door into the cabin when he heard a sound that made his heart lurch in his chest. He braced a h
and against the doorframe to keep from falling over. The moment of terror was intense, easily surpassing anything he’d experienced in the last few years. But not allowing fear to paralyze him into inaction was yet another lesson his father had hammered home time and again.

  Noah backed away from the door and turned to stare out at the dark woods. Several silent moments passed as he stood there and peered into the darkness, waiting to hear the sound again.

  I didn’t hear what I thought I heard, he thought. It’s just my mind fucking with me in some new, even more messed-up than usual way.

  This might even have been true. Hell, it was probably true, because the sound Noah thought—or imagined—he’d heard had been a brief burst of laughter.

  There’d been a lilting, distinctly feminine tinge to the sound. Or so he’d thought. But the longer the silence drew out, the more sure he was that his ears had misinterpreted some animal sound. It was the most logical explanation. He could think of no good reason why a girl or young woman would suddenly be in the woods outside his mountain cabin, years after his last glimpse of another human being. And why, for fuck’s sake, would she have laughed? This wasn’t a situation or setting conducive to laughter. Unless, of course, the person doing the laughing was deranged.

  Noah shivered.

  Now there’s a comforting thought.

  Noah was by no means an expert on the subject of mental illness, but he thought it was a good bet that any lone person laughing in the woods at night was probably some kind of lunatic. Or maybe there was an even more sinister underlying truth. Maybe this was a sign he was cracking up. He wanted to shrug off the idea as ludicrous, but this wasn’t easy to do.

  The sound came again.

  Noah went into the cabin and closed the door, locking it behind him. He scurried rapidly around the cabin’s interior, bumping into things in the dark as he scrambled to lock all the windows and shut the blinds. He got one of the oil lamps lit and carried it over to the fireplace, where he planned to park himself for the rest of the night. This would give him the best defensive central position against anyone trying to enter the cabin. He set the oil lamp down, retrieved the rifle from the kitchen, and dragged a chair from the dining table over to the fireplace.

  He sat in the chair and braced the rifle across his legs.

  The sound had been clearer the second time. And closer. It’d definitely been the laughter of a girl or young woman.

  And there had definitely been a taunting quality to her laughter.

  Noah stared at the door and waited for something to happen.

  5.

  Nothing happened.

  Noah got antsy after sitting as close to completely still as possible for well over an hour. New doubts about what he had heard began to seep in as the minutes crept by with excruciating slowness. He began to toy with the idea of poking his head back outside to take another look around, only this time he would take the rifle with him. If anyone really was out there, maybe seeing the weapon would make whoever it was think twice about bothering him. Despite his fear, the idea was not without allure. He was tired of sitting here in the dark.

  But Noah stayed where he was.

  He sat there and thought intently about the situation, those new doubts festering and growing stronger the longer the silence stretched out. He had been certain of what he’d heard prior to locking himself in the cabin, but now he was revisiting the idea that the sound had been produced by an animal or perhaps even some kind of insect. Maybe his perceptions had still been off a bit after all the weed he’d smoked before his long nap. He seized on this idea with fervent intensity the moment it occurred to him. It was much more comforting than the notion that some mystery person had been observing him from the woods, presumably even before he’d regained consciousness.

  But the idea didn’t really hold water. His weed was potent stuff, but there was no way the buzz would have lingered so long after his last inhalation. He had to grudgingly admit the sound had been no pot-induced aural hallucination. But he remained unwilling to let go of the resurgent idea that he’d misinterpreted an animal sound. There were animals capable of mimicking sounds made by humans. Hell, maybe someone’s pet parakeet had flown the coop years ago, back sometime around when everything went to hell, and had only just now made its way to Noah’s part of the world.

  Noah nodded.

  This was an actually plausible explanation for what he’d heard. It certainly seemed more rational than the idea that some crazy person was out there in the woods. There was just one problem—Noah didn’t really believe he’d heard a parakeet, or any other kind of animal, for that matter.

  There was a girl out there in the woods.

  A laughing, mentally unhinged girl. How or why she’d come to be out there didn’t matter. And he was definitely right to fear her. No normal person would announce their presence that way. Years after the end of the world, “normal” was a more relative term than ever, but there was no way that taunting laughter had come from someone who wasn’t mentally bent in some way. The girl might yet turn out to be harmless, but Noah thought it wise to assume otherwise until he was proven wrong.

  More time passed, maybe another full hour, in absolute silence.

  Noah’s restlessness deepened.

  At last, unable to take sitting there any longer, he slipped off his boots and rose from the chair to creep slowly across the hardwood floor to the window by the door. In the event whoever was out there had come closer to the cabin, Noah didn’t want her hearing his footsteps. Letting out a breath, he slipped some fingers between slats of the window blind and parted them wide enough to peek outside.

  There was no one on the porch, and the light from the moon was bright enough to see that the clearing was empty. He turned his head side to side, taking in as much as he could see of the surrounding area. Carrying the rifle with him, he made a circuit of the entire cabin, peeking out every window until he was certain his visitor had not come out of the woods. There was no one in the garden out back, nor was anyone visible in the vicinity of the well or the log pile. He supposed it was possible a lurker might be crouching behind the pile, but he opted not to investigate further. The survey of his surroundings had turned up no signs of impending threat. That was good enough for now.

  He returned to the chair in front of the fireplace and sat down again.

  After a while, his eyelids began to droop. He fought a losing battle against fatigue a bit longer, but he eventually surrendered and stretched out on the floor, sleeping with one hand gripped loosely around the stock of the rifle.

  When Noah opened his eyes again, he was surprised to find he’d slept through the night. The oil lamp had gone out, but faint morning light filtered in through the window blinds, pushing back the fading semi-darkness in the cabin’s outer room. Having slept on his side, Noah stared blearily at the front door a few moments, his head fuzzy and focused on nothing other than how dry his mouth felt. Upon realizing how many hours he must have been unconscious, he sat bolt upright and grabbed the rifle. He got to his feet and did a quick sweep of the cabin, heaving a sigh of immense relief when he determined that no one had gotten in during the night.

  His heart still racing, he sat down long enough to pull on his boots.

  Then he went outside.

  The laughing girl was waiting for him out on the porch.

  6.

  Noah was all the way through the door by the time he noticed the girl in the rocking chair. He immediately cursed himself for his stupidity and shortsightedness. He’d failed to do a preliminary check of the area around the cabin before stepping outside. It was the kind of dumb mistake that could have meant the end of his life.

  However, unless she had something concealed, the girl didn’t appear to be in possession of a weapon. Also, her slight build and stature strongly suggested she was no immediate physical threat. And a quick glance around the clearing appeared to confirm she was alone. These things didn’t excuse letting his guard down, but the shock of sud
denly finding himself in the presence of another living person after so long allowed him to shrug off the oversight.

  The girl had moved the chair to the edge of the porch and was rocking back and forth very slowly in it. Though he couldn’t see her face, he had a strong sense that she wasn’t very old. Her hair was long and black without a single thread of gray in it. It was perfectly straight and fell well past her slender shoulders. She continued to rock in the chair as the moments stretched out, giving no indication of being aware of his presence, though she had to have heard the creak of the door opening behind her as well as the heavy tread of his boots.

  The shock of seeing her there failed to ebb even after several minutes of silent observation. He was having a hard time convincing himself she was real and kept expecting her to disappear, to maybe turn translucent and fade away like a ghost in some old movie. But that didn’t happen and his brow furrowed as something he couldn’t quite pinpoint initially began to trouble him.

  Then his eyes widened.

  That hair…there was something familiar about it.

  He shook his head.

  No. It can’t be.

  He swallowed hard and struggled for a moment to find his voice, finally managing to utter a single, almost inaudible word: “Aubrey?”

  A small laugh was the girl’s only response to this query. It was identical to the one he’d heard last night.

  Gathering his courage, Noah stepped away from the door and joined her at the front of the porch. He stood a few feet to her right as he peered down into her face, his heart hammering faster when he saw that his guess had been right.